Digital Paintings and Collages by Maureen Shaughnessy

All images copyright © by Maureen Shaughnessy. If you would like to use these images in any way, you must have written permission. Email me to ask about purchasing or using my artwork. (you can find my email on the profile page.) Thank you for your courtesy,

Wild Geese (after Mary Oliver)

Copyright© 2007 by Maureen Shaughnessy

I have posted the poem, Wild Geese before, on Raven's Nest and Land of Little Rain. It's worth posting again (and again.) Everytime I read this poem, I come at it from a different angle, as a different person.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- © by Mary Oliver.

Oliver's latest collection of poems, Our World, is a collaboration between Mary and her late partner, Molly Malone Cook, who made the photographs accompanying the poems. Molly died in 2005.

Another exquisite book of Oliver's poems, Thirst, touches her experiences with grief and spiritual growth after Molly's death. I read these poems often -- Mary Oliver's sense of faith and connection have helped me personally through times of great sorrow.

I made the digital painting above, using my own images and two from Liz Saunders, of Alberta.

Her photos:

Snow Geese flying up from a lake

Canada Geese, blue sky

Poetry Thursday: words conjure more than meaning

Although my post for today is not in the form of a poem, it is about poetry -- visual poetry. This is an illustration of one of the ways I mix poetry (the written kind) with other senses in my mind and body. I wrote this post for the PT writing prompt, The Body Knows ...

FRAGMENTS OF AN ANCIENT POETRY

Imagine a word such as moon. When you say moon, your lips curve. The word itself has curves. It conjures: round and old, and traveling on a long, slow-sounding journey. It's interesting to me, that along with the sound of a word, the visual aspect of the word affects its meaning.

As a sculptor, I'm fascinated by the shapes of language and as a writer I'm drawn to the meaning of shapes. This is a natural merging of two of my primary interests. Fragments of an Ancient Poetry is a three-dimensional page of my sketchbook-journal, revealing the increasingly refined and complex strokes of a thought process, or poetic idea.

--excerpted from artist's statement for Fragments of an Ancient Poetry

THEN:
Newspaper announcement, left, of a solo exhibit of my mixed media sculptures in 1987 at the Third Eye Gallery in Helena, Montana. A friend shot these photos at the opening reception. I completed the majority of the pieces shown in this exhibit (along with some working studies, sketches and paintings also exhibited) while attending a papermaking intensive at the Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada.

The other major piece in the exhibit is titled Sometimes Breathing Feels like Dancing (one of ten figures in that piece is shown, left)

NOW:
I'm 20 years older now. Maybe 20 years wiser, though that's arguable. As I revisit my artist's statements and photographs of my work from that period of my life, I realize I have a different perspective now. I hope it's a broader perspective. I still love these pieces and wish we lived in a house with walls large enough to display them.

I look at the figures in "Sometimes Breathing Feels like Dancing." I see my youthful body bent gracefully, supplely, just like the willow branches I used to form the dance. My life has taken some twists and turns ... in many ways I am still dancing with life. And death. With joy. And sorrow. And grief. Feeling the grace along with twinges of pain, love, longing ... feeling bent, slightly dried out, though still beautiful.

Will I ever truly know the steps of this dance? Enough to look ahead, to feel confident that I will not trip over my own feet? That I will be able to glide over the dance floor without regret, with my heart open to the music, to the senses, to the love of the one whose body sways in rhythm with mine?

Looking back on the experiences that have brought me to this threshold, I would also say, that "Sometimes Dancing Feels like Breathing."

This week's prompt for PT was to start with one line of someone else's poem, for inspiration, as a springboard, as a threshold to your own verse. Please head over to Poetry Thursday website for links to other participants' poems for this week.

Soul of a Tree

The Festival of Trees #6 is up at Arboreality ... and here is a link to the main Festival of Trees blog. I'd like to share this slideshow with my blog visitors, in celebration of trees, photos I have taken over the last 4 seasons:

If you'd like to see any of the slideshow photos individually and/or at larger sizes, just click on the photo in the slideshow window and it should take you to that photo's page in my flickr account. For the large sizes, you have to click the button above the photo that says "all sizes"

Thanks for visiting my blog, for reading and (hopefully) enjoying the photos
Maureen

Dream Logic

All artwork on this blog as well as my Flickr page is Copyright by Maureen Shaughnessy and is not
to be used without my permission and credited to me. You can find my email address in my profile.
Thank you for your consideration.

See more of my digital collages in this gallery. Best if viewed as a slideshow.